Staff as the sales team: training front-line teams to take an enquiry

In a hotel or banquet property, the first person a guest speaks to is rarely a salesperson. It is the front desk clerk, the reservations executive or the banquet captain who picks up on the third ring. If each of them answers differently and writes the enquiry in a different place, the property loses bookings it has already paid to attract. Give all three one script, one sheet and one handover rule. Then an enquiry stops depending on who happens to pick up.

Where enquiries actually go missing

For example, take an invented banquet hall with a front desk, a reservations number and a banquet manager. A wedding enquiry arrives by call at the front desk on a busy evening. The clerk takes the name, says "someone will call you", writes it on a slip. The slip goes into a drawer. Next morning, the same family calls the reservations number and is asked all the same questions again, and by then they have a second hall's price on their phone.

Nobody was lazy. There was no shared place to write and no rule about who calls back. That is the thing to fix, before any talk about attitude.

One script for the first two minutes

A first-contact script is short. It has four jobs: greet, find out what the guest wants, give the one fact that keeps them on the line, and agree the next step.

1. Greet with the property and your name. "Good evening, Sagar Palace, this is Meena."
2. Ask three things before anything else. What is the occasion, how many guests and which date? Write them down as they speak.
3. Give one useful fact. For a hall, whether that date is free. For a room, whether that room type is available. Do not give a tariff before you know the date.
4. Agree the next step, out loud. "Our banquet manager, Patil, will call you at six this evening to share the price sheet and fix a visit. Is this the best number?"

Practise it aloud. Each person reads it twice and then takes a pretend call from a colleague who plays a difficult guest: someone who asks for the price first, or who will not give a date. Do this at the start of a shift, not in a classroom.

One lead sheet, kept where everyone can see it

A shared sheet works better than a register for each department. Use a spreadsheet on a shared drive or a printed sheet at the front desk that is copied into the sheet every evening. The columns:

Staff fill the first six columns. The owner of the next step updates the last. Someone reads the sheet aloud in a short huddle at the start of the working day, rather than sending it to a manager to be summarised.

The handover rule

Write one line on the wall: whoever takes it, writes it; whoever owns the next step, calls. Then add the exceptions.

• Anything involving a discount goes to the manager. The staff member says so plainly rather than inventing a figure.
• A guest who is at the front desk now gets served first. A promised call-back happens at the time the clerk said.
• If the owner of the next step is off, the sheet shows a named backup.

The rule makes it possible to say honestly to the guest what will happen next, which is what they remember. Our post on the group booking enquiry checklist gives the details to collect when the enquiry is for a party or event.

For example: a three-hall banquet property in Belagavi

Picture an invented banquet property in Belagavi with three halls. It gets calls on the front desk line, on a reservations mobile and on the banquet manager's personal phone, because families have that number from earlier functions. Three notebooks, no single list, and once a month someone discovers a date held for two families.

On the second attempt, all three numbers get the same script. The sheet goes on a shared drive, and the clerk adds the banquet manager's calls to it at the end of each shift. The manager agrees to say "let me note this for the sheet" to families who ring directly. The date question becomes the first fact given, so the clerk checks the calendar column before any promise.

Double holds stop, because the hold appears in one place. The downside is real: the manager grumbles that families now wait while a clerk is asked to check the sheet, and for the first fortnight a few Saturday calls are still written on slips and never reach the sheet. The fix is the morning read, where an empty row for a known call gets named.

It works when the property has someone willing to read the sheet every morning. If nobody does, the sheet becomes a graveyard, and the first thing to fix is who owns it. It also does not suit a property so small that one person answers every call, where a notebook will do.

Keep the sheet honest

A sheet only helps if people believe it is read. At the morning huddle the manager reads the previous day's rows, names the calls that have an owner and asks about the ones that do not.

After a few weeks, read the "lost (and why)" column together. The reasons will be your own: the date was gone, the price was higher, nobody replied in time. Each one points to a change in the script, the price sheet or the hand-off.

Your first task is today's: print the sheet, put it at the front desk, and read the script aloud with whoever is on shift. If you would rather have an outsider run the practice rounds, see sales training and development. The wider picture for a property is on the hospitality sales and marketing hub, and to have the script and sheet built for your own team, tell us what you need.